Paperback reprint of a book depicting the oddly brilliant relationship between Alfred Hitchcock and David O. Selznick, two of Hollywood's most legendary filmmakers.

Throughout his career, Alfred Hitchcock had to contend with a wide variety of censors attuned to the slightest suggestion of sexual innuendo, undue violence, toilet humor, religious disrespect, and all forms of indecency, real or imagined. From 1934 to 1968, the Motion Picture Production Code Office controlled the content and final cut on all films made and distributed in the United States. During their review of Hitchcock's films, the censors demanded an average of 22.5 changes, ranging from the mundane to the mind-boggling, on each of his American films. In his award-winning Hitchcock and the Censors, author John Billheimer traces the forces that led to the Production Code and describes Hitchcock's interactions with code officials on a film-by-film basis as he fought to protect his creations, bargaining with code reviewers and sidestepping censorship to produce a lifetime of memorable films. Despite the often-arbitrary decisions of the code board, Hitchcock still managed to push the boundaries of sex and violence permitted in films by charming—and occasionally tricking—the censors, and by swapping off bits of dialogue, plot points, and individual shots (some of which had been deliberately inserted as trading chips) to protect cherished scenes and images. By examining Hitchcock's priorities in dealing with the censors, this work highlights the director's theories of suspense as well as his magician-like touch when negotiating with code officials.

"The most revealing, penetrating book on filmmaking I know of . . ."--King Vidor David O. Selznick was a unique figure in the golden Hollywood studio era. He produced some of the greatest and most memorable American films ever made--notably, Rebecca, A Star Is Born, Anna Karenina, A Farewell to Arms, and, above all, Gone With the Wind. Selznick's absolute power and artistic control are evidenced in his impassioned, eloquent, witty, and sometimes rageful memos to directors, writers, stars and studio executives, writings that have become almost as famous as his films. Newsweek wrote,"I can't imagine how a book on the American movie business could be more illuminating, more riveting or more fun to read than this collection of David Selznick's memos.

In Hitchcock's Appetites, Casey McKittrick offers the first book-length study of the relationship between Hitchcock's body size and his cinema. Whereas most critics and biographers of the great director are content to consign his large figure and larger appetite to colorful anecdotes of his private life, McKittrick argues that our understanding of Hitchcock's films, his creative process, and his artistic mind are incomplete without considering his lived experience as a fat man. Using archival research of his publicity, script collaboration, and personal communications with his producers, in tandem with close textual readings of his films, feminist critique, and theories of embodiment, Hitchcock's Appetites produces a new and compelling profile of Hitchcock's creative life, and a fuller, more nuanced account of his auteurism.

In a career that spanned six decades and more than sixty films, Alfred Hitchcock became the most widely recognized director who ever lived. His films -- including The 39 Steps, Notorious, Rear Window, Vertigo, Psycho, and The Birds -- set new standards for cinematic invention and storytelling Élan. Since his death, Hitchcock has become crystallized in the public imagination as the macabre Englishman, the sexual obsessive, the Master of Suspense. But this remarkable biography draws on prodigious new research to restore Hitchcock the man -- the ingenious craftsman, the avid collaborator, the constant trickster, provocateur, and romantic. Like Hitchcock's best films, Patrick McGilligan's life of Hitchcock is a drama full of revelation, graced by a central love story, dark humor, and cliff-hanging suspense: a definitive portrait of the most creative, and least understood, figure in film history.

This biography of Alfred Hitchcock is as intriguing, revealing, perverse, and entertaining as any of his classic films. 'The best book yet about the movies' most famous director' Publisher's Weekly 'No one will ever top Hitch' Jimmy Stewart One of cinema's greatest directors, a virtuoso visual artist, and a genius of the suspense genre, Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) is universally known for such masterpieces as Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, and The Birds. But he was also a famously difficult and complex man, prone to arguing with studios and stars alike. In writing this biography, John Russell Taylor, a distinguished film critic and friend of Hitchcock's, enjoyed his full cooperation. Based on numerous interviews, with photos from the private family albums, and an in-depth study of the making of his last film, this biography of the director is as intriguing, revealing, perverse, and entertaining as any Hitchcock classic.

In this Companion, leading film scholars and critics of American culture and imagination trace Hitchcock's interplay with the Hollywood studio system, the Cold War, and new forms of sexuality, gender, and desire over his thirty-year American career.

The authorized biography of this Hollywood producer, who made REBECCA and GONE WITH THE WIND, looking at his career from his swift rise to prominence to the collapse of his empire.